The Whale and the Hockey Stick

A lot of things have to come together for a good image of the planets. The air needs to be as still as possible, the planet you’re imaging needs to be as directly overhead as possible, and the planet itself should be as close to the Earth as possible. And then, all your equipment has…

I’ve imaged this one before, but for whatever reason I picked up way more detail on it last night. Part of it’s a better camera and better tracking on the telescope mount, but I think conditions may have just been really awesome last night. It’s not normal to have this many good nights for astrophotography…

(Image credit: ddmitr, iStockPhoto.com) Every picture on this site was taken from a suburban driveway in a “red zone” on the light pollution map, literally underneath a streetlight. Every year more subdivisions and apartment buildings spring up in my city, and light pollution from the metro Orlando area just keeps getting worse. There are four…

I wasn’t able to travel to the path of totality, but here from Florida we still had a partial eclipse. Here’s my shot at its peak, viewed through a special solar telescope using a Hydrogen-Alpha filter to bring out all the roiling detail of the sun’s surface. Check out those prominences around the edge!

Here’s my latest image of the “Bubble Nebula”, one of my favorite objects in our galaxy. That blue “bubble” is a shell of gas pushed out by the stellar wind of the bright star just right of its center. It’s a big star, 10-20 times larger than our sun. Its radiation is also illuminating and…

If you look at the constellation Orion in the winter night’s sky, the center of Orion’s “sword” is not a star at all – it is the brightest nebula in our sky, M42 or the Great Nebula of Orion. Sitting right on top of it is technically another nebula designated M43, and above that is…